Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

When an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

I am bored in France, especially as everyone resembles Voltaire.

What matters an eternity of damnation to someone who has found in one second the infinity of joy?

The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.

God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, -- actions, desires, dreams, words!

Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!

The world is composed of folks who can think only in common, in bands.

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,Richness, quietness and pleasure.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters... But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!

I am the wound and the knife!I am the blow and the cheek!I am the limbs and the wheel—The victim and the executioner!

Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence.

There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère[Hypocrite reader—my double—my brother]!

What is art? Prostitution.

There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself.

A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias — because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love — we must be stingy with it.

You must shock the bourgeois.

O Death, old captain, it is time! raise the anchor!

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.